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Thursday, 26 September 2013

Not much sewing going on, and what I have been sewing is not in any state to be shown to the general public! I have been rather distracted by all kind of things, but it hasn't escaped my attention that Autumn has well and truly descended - in a foggy kind of way - as we have been with our heads in the clouds this week (in a literal sense)!Also I found these in the garden:

Thursday, 5 September 2013

I am really enjoying the random posts that appear on Thursdays, so I have to try it myself, too, of course...

Whether I am sewing, reading or working at the computer it's usually not long before I make myself a cup of tea. So my first "random" has to start with a cup of tea...

Of course the British are well known for their love of a cuppa, but the first Europeans to "discover" tea in
East Asia were in fact the Portuguese. However it was the Dutch who brought it to
Europe in 1610.

Tea didn't arrive in England until the 1650's, though it was still extremely rare and expensive at first. Only in the mid
1700's tea became popular and cheap enough to replace
gin as the drink of the poor.

Probably not the way gin was drunk in those days...

Tea bags were a more modern invention from America in the early 1800's, initially made to hold samples of teas brought from India.

I grew up drinking my tea weak and without milk, but these days my tea is (somewhat) stronger and I always add a drop of milk.How do you drink yours?Linking up with

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Looking back through my blog posts, I am surprised to even see a post in August at all, it feels as if I have been in "non-posting" mode for months...

But here I am again, and with a quilting story, though there is not all that much achieved or finished!!
You may remember this quilt top:

It "only" needed quilting...
So after I received my backing fabric it got pin basted:

As I had seen several quilts with spiral quilting and really like the effect, I thought (innocently?) I'd do that. And it worked brilliantly:

My spiral looked lovely, UNTIL:

Can you see it??

PUCKERS!!
And while I was considering what to do about that, I realised something else...

Usually with spiral quilting the start is the most awkward, being in the centre of the quilt where not only a large part of the quilt needs to be accommodated under the arm of the machine, but the circles are rather tightly curved. As the spiral progresses (and if you go the right way round) you get further away from the centre, the manoeuvring of the quilt gets less cumbersome and the curves become more gentle.

Only I was NOT planning on doing the usual thing (I usually don't...): I had planned to do a spiral IN EACH CUBE, with the centre square of the cube as the centre of each spiral. Now it dawned on me that that would mean I'd have to wrestle the whole quilt width (and worst: the whole quilt length!!) through the arm of the machine at some point!!! As well as starting with very tight curves 12 times over...

So the whole exercise led to this:

I unpicked my spiral, lesson learned! (I may try again, though... I still like it)

The quilt has been basted again, after some more rigorous stretching of the layers, and new quilting plans have been made and started... No spirals on this quilt!!